Paper Info
Title
Diff/TS: A Tool for Fine-Grained Structural Change Analysis
Abstract
This paper reports on a tool for fine-grained analysis of structuralchanges made between revisions of programs. The tool, calledDiff/TS, calculates, visualizes and classifies edit operationsincluding ``moves'' that will change one revision into another bymeans of detailed tree structural analysis on source code. Suchanalysis tends to be time consuming and inflexible. We haveextended a general tree comparison algorithm with heuristics drivencontrol configurable for multiple programming languages and haveachieved both processing speed and analysis precision needed forinvestigating large-scale software projects. The tool is capable ofprocessing Python, Java, C and C++ projects. We present severalapplications including software ``archaeology'' on a widely known opensource software project and automated ``phylogenetic'' malwareclassification based on control flows. These examples suggest thattree differencing is useful for measuring distance or dissimilaritybetween tree structured artifacts, and offer good precision tests ofthe method.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1109/WCRE.2008.44
WCRE
Keywords
Field
DocType
fine-grained structural change analysis,good precision test,fine-grained analysis,large-scale software project,general tree comparison algorithm,structural analysis,analysis precision,opensource software project,detailed tree,capable ofprocessing python,dissimilaritybetween tree,classification algorithms,algorithm design and analysis,control flow graph,software maintenance,tree structure,pediatrics,structural change,tree data structures,configuration management,java,programming language,software archaeology,control flow,source code
Programming language,Software archaeology,Computer science,Source code,Tree (data structure),Theoretical computer science,Software,Software maintenance,Statistical classification,Java,Python (programming language)
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1095-1350
19
0.70
References 
Authors
18
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Masatomo Hashimoto1685.97
Akira Mori2190.70